"Jenny" also struck upon what may be mentioned now as the deepest chord in Johnstone's sympathies; it is heard sounding in the letters, quoted below, that review the stories of Ruth, Fantine, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. His attitude in this matter was free from conventional ethics, and was, therefore, essentially Christian; and the relations of society to technically errant women, who have lapsed even once by accident, preoccupied him bitterly, and that in no theoretical or sequestered way. In his own gipsy experience, he witnessed at least one instance where the issue only just escaped disaster. He was haunted by the story, as De Quincey was by that of his lost companion in Oxford Street. The girl whom Johnstone, though generally hard up, managed to befriend in his secret, chivalrous and effectual fashion, finally married some one decent and respectable. Concealing the place and circumstance, he afterwards cast the incident of the "Fantine of Shotover" (we also conceal, of course, the name of the village) into a kind of prose sketch or _poème_, which he finished when he was about twenty-six, re-wrote twice, and thought of printing. It is unfortunately not now to be traced. Its musical, exalted prose, if inexperienced in form, gave genuine promise in that kind of composition; but he never to our knowledge, pursued the vein, and the prose in which he became expert was, apart from his letters, purely critical and expository. Still, enough has been said to show the force and unusual bent of Johnstone's human sympathies. It is clear that a young man's truth of instinct and strength of head are never more hardly taxed than when he is confronted with a concrete story of this kind. He may become foolish in opposite ways, especially if he is also an artist and has strength of temperament. He may be personally entangled through his sympathies, and make ill worse. He may be superior, and spoil everything by clumsy missionary benevolence, hard of hand. It is something if he can get behind the ordinary, blind, damnatory formulæ of society. This however, is not so difficult to a free mind. What is harder is to do it, and yet to see the facts without mere theorising, without the cumber of rhetorical and literary sentiment that obscures them. A Scotch-descended brain is useful at this point. In our memory Johnstone rose to the occasion thus presented, and acted and judged with balance. But we are more concerned now with the road by which he arrived at his force of sympathy. Æstheticism of the rootless academic kind had, it is evident, no hold upon him; he was too angry to be precious; but his motive power at bottom was that of the artist, as it was surely not that of the radical theorist or philanthropic organiser; although it was, if we use accurate language, by no means less human than theirs. What was at work was his sense of beauty; of physical beauty, first of all, or of grace, in the victimised person, as the sign and vesture of an originally sound